Gustavo Santaolla's Score for The Motorcycle Diaries

The music Santaolla composed for this film is just wonderful. Also The main theme score of the film sounded very homey to my ears, listen to it here.

.
I enjoyed the gloominess of the peaceful rainy day that passed.
This song is the mood i'm in today.
I'm looking forward to having my roomie back tomorrow...

Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah

This is such a beautiful song. The music and tune soak into you, the lyrics is so romantic and Tom Higgenson's voice is so touching. I wanted to save this for my valentine's day post, and title it the most romantic song of the year, but i've been listening to this nonstop since afternoon, and i can't wait till then!

P.S. watch it here if you can't open youtube.
P.S.2. If you'd like to learn to play it check here.

SandFantasy - Love 2008

Happy 2008

It doesn't much feel like the "New Year" to me, but it is a new figure in my calender: 08. I favor number seven in general so i'm gonna miss dating oh-seven this year.
Tonight i was thinking i wouldn't mind being a bartender on the NYE. This way i could have sent one kid who really cherish being with family and friends for his/her new year, home.
Happy 2008 to y'all. I hope you had the chance to enjoy your NYE. I did. I danced:)

A winter morning tale

The weather here was been unseasonably sunny and bright for the past couple of days. You might say good for you, but i had a hard time sleeping in the morning. The shinny daylight would come in through my bedroom curtains and wake me up early in the morning. Yesterday i was glad to wake up to a cloady gloomy day around noon:) Everything has its own place.

Painting: Camille PISSARRO, French 1831–1903 , Boulevard Montmartre, morning, cloudy weather 1897

Joy of Cooking

I spent hours in the kitchen today cooking for a small party i'm having tomorrow. It's been a while for me since i cooked, real cooking. It's almost a year that i have adaopted a healthy eating diet, preparing low fat meals, whole grains, ... . And you know that style, although good for you, doesn't much go inline with a real Persian kitchen. So today i cut myself a break, i cooked the old style, using Kermanshahi butter and fried onions in my stew. I made Mirzaghasemi the authentic Rashti style, frying the barbecued eggplants... . My friend came over and made hummus, not cutting back on tahini and olive oil. We poured exactly the amount of oil required for the cake into the batter. I frosted it with real good melted chocolate. I enjoyed my time in the kitchen.

P.S. Can somebody come and help me clean up now?:)

A Musical Christmas of '07

It's Christmas eve. I'm home alone, still recovering from my cold. PBS is having the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on, and next is the Boston Pops (photo above). Christmas to me means music, and lot and lots of it, it's a happy season:)

P.S. If you're home alone tonight too, here's my present to you, the old good cartoon of my childhood years.
P.S.2. PBS continued with Christmas at Belmont, which was quite good too. Thanks god for pbs!

Happy Yalda

It is the longest night of the year, Yalda night. Yalda to me means family. The special noodle-rice dish that my mom insists we have to have at Yalda to master our lives in the months to follow. It means the big crystal bowl of pomegranates, which was my job to prepare when i grow older. It means my dad bringing home the last watermelon of the season. It means Yalda nuts with Basloghs that i used to love, and many other tastes and smells. It means playing backgammon on the beautifully hand crafted family piece. It means bibliomancy from Hafez collection of poems. I miss my family in this Yalda night, maybe more than before cause i'm down with a cold.

Happy Yalda to you all. I wish for you and me the strength to endure the longest of the dark in our lives to wake up to the dawn of a bright Sun.

P.S.1. Thanks for your comments on the last post. I'll get back to them as soon as i feel physically better.
P.S.2. I so much crave Baslogh. I'm gonna experiment and make some when i get better. Here's the recipe i've found on the web.

Where is our social manner?

Yesterday someone sent me a video showing a naked man walking in the middle of a crowded street in Tehran. He shouts and hits himself and it is visible that the poor man is mentally sick. After a while the police comes and takes him into custody.

Now the video is recorded by what seems to be a young man and his friend on a cell phone camera device. So what is most audible in the video is the comments and laughs between these two boys. And that is what made me really upset. They laugh and make fun of the naked retard man, like they are the audience of a comic show, and boast about how this video they're shooting is gonna be a hit on the internet. It was truly so painful to listen to those comments, and i spare you from the experiance. It makes me sad to witness how socially indecent the young generation of my fellow iranians has become. Isn't treating a sick person with compassion part of social codes to be honored in any society, let alone a so called religious one ? Those type of behaviors used to bother me immensely, and God knows that was so frequent in everyday life in iran.

It could as well be that i've lived in academia for the past few years and am only exposed to an above normal environmet, but since i came to US i have not witnessed a single thing like that here. Where is the problem? Why is that we have failed to teach our youngsters the very basic social codes?

Sundays with Rain and Icicles*

Freezing rain in the city for a couple of days and now the trees are all ice covered. In the dim light of the cloudy days they look like beautifully made crystals. I look at them with the peace of mind knowing the bare branches are in their winter sleep and probably wouldn't feel the cold ice all over their skin. The same ice that has been a feast to my eyes past few days. The grass however is still green, but that too is covered in a layer of thin ice. It's like somebody has carefully laid a sheer fragile throw over them to protect them from the cold. This icy green is something i had never seen before.

Cold can be beautiful too.
*-The title is inspired by Leva's Sunday pictures.

Handel's Messiah

Listen Here.

"Yet once, a little while
and i will shake
the heavens and the earth
the sea and the dry land.
and I will shake all nations;
and the desire of all nations shall come."

As i sat there and listened to the orchestra playing, and the chorus singing these biblical verses, i made a wish. That God would shake me the same way too.

Some interesting facts about Handel's Messiah

1. It was interesting to find the similarity between the above verses and the Muslim Iranians' new year prayer.
2. Handel wrote this in English; it was Mozart who later on translated the verses to German and rearranged the oratorio to make it possible to be played in a more classic (no organ) orchestra. The performance i went to tonight was Mozart's arrangement of Handel's Messiah, and it was thus in German. We were given bilingual pamphlets.
3. It used to be performed by an all male (men and boys) choir. I suppose they didn't like the idea of women singing the bible!
4. When it came to the famous Halleluja part, everybody in the audience stood up. You could call it national anthem of heavens i suppose:) They say that King George II rose to his feet at this point, and so the tradition was rooted.
5. German always sounded rough to my ears. If you share that opinion wait till you hear a choir sing Messiah. You'll look at German differently.

My worried STATA!

Okay this is one of those things you might find funny only if you're worked with the statistical software STATA. But i find it pretty amusing so there we go:
When you need to increase the memory assigned to the software- and that occasionally happens when you're working with big datasets, if you give the command while you already have some variables out there, the STATA will comment "no; data in memory would be lost". This "no" in the beginning of the error comment is so funny. I picture a worried mom on the other side of the monitor telling a caring "no" to his kid when he comes to the table with unwashed hands!

P.S. Another interesting comment I received from the software today: "STATA needs attention!" who doesn't, buddy?:)

I am Iran; Do Not Bomb Me!

My dear friends Tameshk and Nazy made this beautiful slide show of Iran. The work is inspired by anti-war protests in San Francisco and Berkeley in October and November.
Please share the video.

If you can't access Youtube, watch it here:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/11/30/1617352/Nazy-2-utube.mov

Lamingtons!

I can't believe how much work it was!
Lamingtons are some kind of Australian treats. They are cake cubes, coated in a layer of chocolate icing then desiccated coconut. It took me 2 days and a totally wrecked kitchen and a back pain to make these, but it was worthed. I MADE Lamingtons :D
I also successfully made Tameshk's turkey meatloaf, plus some Magic cookie bars. I've had my share of cooking this thanksgiving weekend, from now on, i'll just sit back and eat:) Btw, this video teaches you how to cut the turkey, in case you need to perform the task tomorrow, i'll again sit back and eat the cut turkey!

Wishes do not wash the dishes* !

Or equivalently, wishes do not pack your stuff:) I have nagged here about how i hate packing before, i remember. And I always end up un-packed, behind my laptop late at night (it's 12:35) when i have to wake up early and hit the road the next morning.
I'm going hiking in Tennessee. I'll post a photo here when i come back. Have a good weekend everyone.

*I heard this sentence from one of my English teachers years ago, and it stuck in my mind. I use it from time to time, but i googled it now and apparently it is not a common expression.

Katie Melua - I Cried for you

(Try this link if you can't open youtube.)

La Boheme

I went to the opera of La Boheme in our Krannert Center today. I don't have a classical music education, but there is something about opera that gets me. The direct exposure to the music that comes not from a man-made instrument, but from flesh and blood. This was actually my second experience of a live opera. The other one was Oedipus a couple of years ago. Although the performers of Oedipus were well known, and La Boheme was produced by the theather department in UIUC, but I liked it better.

The pick of the show for me was in the first act when Rodolfo was telling Mimi of his love for her and she would reply back, all happening under the gentle mist of the moonlight. As their voices went higher and higher I could feel something building in me, like a fire ball of passion that would expands till the point that it wanted to burst out of me, like a crazy flow in my blood vessels that would rise up each second with the music.
What an amazing feeling. What a wonderful performance.

-An economic footnote: Did you know that in 18-19th century the word "Consumption" was used to refer to Tuberculosis!
-A technical footnote: The opera had real time English super-titles. It was much more convinient than looking into booklets as we had to do in Oedipus.

Do you backup?

I went on a trip past couple of day, came back to find my fitness blog is lost. Yes, lost, it says no posts available. I still hopeful that the host fixes this, cause it's not only my blog with this problem, many of my friends there also lost their blog content.

But it would be a tragedy to me if i were to lose my posts here. Does any of you know of an "easy" way to backup a blogger weblog?

Reverse Speech

This  video is really interesting. I ran into it in a
friend's gmail status. It's a part of a TED talk.
You might think the song is tailored to work that
way... it could have, but the idea of Reverse Speech
is that even in the statements we make, there
are words and phrases spoken unconsciously that are
revealed only when our recorded speech is played in
reverse.

A famouse example is Neil Armstrong's "That's one
small step for man" , which in reverse would sound
like "Man will space walk." Read more about it here
and here.I remember in one episode of The Simpsons,
they showed a popular teenagers rock band playing a song
which in reverse would read "Join the Army"!

Post Script: by writing this post i didn't mean that i totally believe or support
this Reverse Speech theory. It was a new thing to me and i found it interesting.
Now whether we speak words unconscionably, is something i look skeptical to as well.